VMware Operations

What are your operational procedures for your VMware environment. I often get asked, "Rod, now that I have my new VMware environment, what do I need to do to run it on an ongoing basis?" To me this comes down to two things.

Monitoring

Your monitoring system provides the following functions for you.

Ensures that you are alerted to any pending problems

Allows you to investigate the current and historical state of your environment to assist in trouble shooting

Your monitoring will certainly consist of VMware vCenter Server and also your hardware monitoring platform. Often these are supplemented by a VMware specific product like Vizioncore vFoglight, Veeam Monitor or Nimsoft.

Management

Your management processes and procedures provide the following functions for you.

A list of maintenance activities to perform on a periodic basis

formal heath check

update templates with patches and updates

A list of operational procedures on how to perform standard maintenance and trouble shooting tasks.

A change management impact matrix to detail the potential impact and risk of a particular type of change.

Here is an example list of operational procedures.

The procedure to create a new virtual machine

The procedure to place a new virtual machine within the virtual infrastructure into a Production state. This may be identical to the physical server commissioning procedure.

The procedure to place an ESX server into and then out of maintenance mode, migrating the guests onto other ESX Server hosts.

The procedure used to contact VMware for support. It should include contact information and specify contact methods as well as means of collecting information.

The procedure to add a LUN to an existing ESX server cluster.

The procedure to patch a template used for creating virtual machines.

The procedure to create a snapshot of a virtual machine.

The procedure to restore the virtual machine state to its previous state at the start of the snapshot.

The procedure for investigating user reported virtual machine performance issues. What to check and how to respond.

The procedure to add a disk to an existing virtual machine.

The procedure to expand the size of an existing disk for a virtual machine.

The procedure to shrink a disk used by a virtual machine.

The procedure to remove a disk from a virtual machine.

The procedure to decommission a virtual machine.

The procedure to migrate (VMotion) a virtual machine between ESX Server hosts in the same ESX cluster.

The procedure to build an ESX server.

The procedure to add an ESX server into an existing ESX cluster.

The procedure to migrate a virtual machine between ESX Server hosts in the different ESX clusters (i.e. between datacenters).

The procedure to confirm that a SAN link is active, to be used after a SAN link has failed and been restored.

The procedure to confirm that a network link is active, to be used after a network link has failed and been restored.

The procedure to enable the network group to troubleshoot user reported network / performance issues.

And for provisioning VM think about a tiering model. How many CPU's / Memory / Storage. Simplify your environment and make it predictable.

One might also consider capacity planning in the virtual world. It would be nice to know when additional resources are needed. Maybe even do trending so you know what to expect within a year / three years from now.

Rodney Haywood

With over 20 years working in the IT industry I have had varied sub careers. My first decade was as a programmer, developing applications whilst working and living in Asia. There was the obligatory dotcom involvement in a fun start up. Working in the SI space I loved being able to work at integrating many various technologies and solving a wide variety of IT problems.
Falling in love with server virtualization caused me to become involved in Cloud Computing which became a great passion due to how much it could help IT do greater things.
Today I spend my time assisting a large team of Solutions Architects across A/NZ at Amazon Web Services. Just like everyone at Amazon I enjoy working hard, try to have some fun and hope to be a small part of making history.